I looked at him without answering.
Not because I didn’t entirely believe him, but because that phrase was insufficient in the face of the grave of two babies.
Not knowing was no longer enough.
Not after years of choosing not to look.
“I didn’t know,” she repeated, “but I should have known. Clara, I… I let her do this to you. I let her do so many things.”
That was more true.
Not an acquittal.
But it is a less cowardly way of approaching the problem.
I heard him say, for the first time, that his mother had spent years punishing him with shame, isolation, cold, confinement, silences, and phrases that seemed like discipline but were actually always small forms of moral sadism.
He told stories from his childhood that suddenly took on a different hue: dark closets, forced fasts, ice-cold water, hours on his knees, prayers repeated until his throat bled.
I knew then that Miriam hadn’t improvised with me.
He perfected his method over decades.
That didn’t make me want to hug him.
It made me better understand the magnitude of the rotten legacy I had lived with, believing that love would be enough to interrupt it.
It’s not enough.
